It Has to be Said

The British police force is the best in the world. A long time ago, when the wrongful conviction of the Birmingham Six was making its slow and painful way into the consciousness of the British media, somebody raised a question about it on the BBC's Question Time. The Birmingham Six - or was it the Guildford Four? - had been imprisoned on faked evidence and on confessions which were beaten out of them. The fakery and the beatings were the work of Britain's boys in blue, the best police force in the world, who are often faced with split-second decisions.

I can't remember what the question was, but at least one panellist preceded her answer with the assertion that if there was one thing that had to be made clear about this case, it was that Britain's police were the best in the world. At that point, someone off-camera presumably held up a sign saying Applause, and the clappity-clappity static of our habitual British self-denigration echoed around the studio for minutes on end.

Bestness in the world is not unique to the British police, of course; not even when the Guildford Four - or perhaps it was the Maguire Seven - are the issue. The NHS is the best health service in the world, especially when another chunk of it is about to be privatised. The British armed forces are frequently the best in the world when they've driven a few of their own recruits to suicide or been caught using members of the subject races as involuntary partners in some very special war-games. The British mother of parliaments is probably the best in the world, most probably when anyone calls for it to be reformed.

This week the British police - the best in the world, in case you didn't know it - are suffering a loss of credibility because some of their armed personnel - almost all British police are unarmed, making them the best in the world - shot dead an innocent man, apparently in the belief that he was a suicide bomber. They were protecting the British public, and they had to make a split-second decision under circumstances of considerable stress. Tony Blair has pointed out, on behalf of the best police force in the world, that if circumstances had been different - if the man had been a suicide bomber and if the best police in the world had not shot him - there might have been adverse criticism. Obviously, that would have been too bad.

The British police force is the best in the world. This needs to be said, as is evident from the number of people who feel obliged to keep saying it. Anti-terrorist hunter-killer units often operate under stressful circumstances. Their self-sacrifice in allowing themselves to be press-ganged into handling weapons (surely you don't imagine they do it because they like the job?) is without parallel. Armed police protecting an ungrateful public from suicide bombers have a dangerous job to do. All this must be said, if only to emphasise the fact that some of them do not appear to have been trained very well in doing it. But let us never doubt it, the British police are the best in the world.